Mamamia sales director insists ‘editorial must produce all the native content’

I think Mamamia and Sound Alliance are treating their staff very poorly here.

Imagine a reporter – who has spent years establishing his or her reputation – is told to write a commercial story about how wonderful Qantas is. Then the next day they are assigned a real news story about, say, high fees charged by airlines.

They’d firstly have to declare they had previously written ads about Qantas (and ethically include this when covering any aviation story). And no matter whether they include Qantas in the story or not, they open themselves to accusations of favouritism.

The editors of these publications are risking the careers and reputations of their reporters. Keep it church and State.

Can we back up ten steps.

“It’s not OK to deceive readers and disguise ads as news.”

Collective audiences are going to be way pissed once they realise this debate is even happening.

This sort of comment…

“It needs to be treated as pure editorial, it must be in stream. It’s really important, and it’s a mistake others have made in the past, where you have a B team that’s producing the native content and you have an A team that’s producing editorial content and you’re readers know that.”

…only makes sense if the intention is to blur completely the line between the two. Indeed, I would strongly argue that your readers should know exactly where that line is.

Does “Rogers” have a first name?

Only a sales person, non-journo argues there should be no division between church and state when it comes to editorial content.
They simply don’t get it: having their top journos write this stuff undermines the credibility of of their content.
It destroys readers’ faith that stories are chosen because of importance rather than commercial interest. Once that’s gone, why would your readers return? And without readers, who’s going to advertise with you?
I’ve been in publishing/journalism for 30 years (magazines, newspapers) and know this pressure from sales departments has been around forever. But it has been resisted. Only now that the biz model is in such dire straits are they able to get a foot in the door. They’re killing the thing they say they support.
A sad state of affairs.

Getting writers at fluffy lifestyle websites and magazines to do advertorial is one thing, but actual news journalists with degrees and integrity should not be pulled into this bullshit.

Only a sales person…..

Gee Gordon -those damn sales people,ad agencies, and clients must have been annoying you for the last 30 years.
Don”t worry too much though – with no revenue coming in, you wont have too put up with it for too much longer.

Well done, Matt. Your snide dismissiveness just proved his point. People like you just don’t get it. Those sales people and agencies lived off the journalistic quality of the content, and the clients bought because of it. Do try to keep up.

No, I won’t have to put up with it for much longer, matt.

One, because native advertising won’t help quality publishing/news survive; and two, because I left journalism to become an academic.

My point was that ad/sales people have different values – and they’re not the values of the newsroom. In my experience they don’t understand or care about the damage done by native advertising; they think it’s a creative way to hide advertising but still pull in the revenue.

Doesn’t it tell you something if there’s a need to disguise the advertising?

Readers on the whole do their best to avoid ads – by using ad blocking widgets, by not clicking on links, by letting their eyes glaze over and hitting the little X in the corner of the box as quickly as possible when the pop-up ad comes on the screen.

This isn’t so much the case in niche publications/websites. Eg, I enjoy the ads in fishing magazines because I’m a keen angler and am interested in new gear. But generally ads are not the reason we buy the mag/newspaper or visit the website.

The last strategy of the ad industry is to infiltrate the part of the publication/website that readers still want and that still has integrity – the quality content. But it’s destroying the integrity of that content.

I know that the revenue from native advertising is tempting. I know the biz model for publishing is screwed. And I don’t know how to fix it. (Do you?)

What I do know is that once a news organisation sells its integrity it has nothing left to sell.

@Gordon The sad truth is that majority of the Australian public aren’t smart enough to care.

Sorry, but this from a website that pulls multiple quotes from other sources into a single page, strings them together with a line or two and calls it an article. Editorial? Does mamamia even know what that is?

“The sad truth is that majority of the Australian public aren’t smart enough to care.”

Yeah…

Fuck.

We’re asking a ‘sales director’? … next question.

Matt seems the sort of person that thinks the ad sales are the ones who pay everyone’s salaries. Sorry mate, you’re selling a product – the audience – and the editorial team builds that product for you to sell. So they’re the ones paying your salary.

Of course the sales director is going to spin that line. Mammamia has 20 year olds writing their ‘editorial’ so I don’t think you can compare like for like here. The MM business is built on advertorial. It works for advertisers and is making MM a motza no doubt but it will be a sad day you see respected journos at fairfax, news ltd and guardian having pressure put on them to write for advertisors.

These aren’t exactly newsbreakers or investigative outlets and nor are they likely more than a lot of op-ed disguised as credible content. As a result, having the writers pen fluff pieces for advertisers is really not a whole lot different to their normal stuff … albeit with better yield for the publisher.

Good on them trying to find a way to survive and/or generate enough hype to get someone to buy them.